Linux Mint 14 released, leaves fresh taste in our mouths

Easy distro takes a different UI path than Ubuntu, and we like it.

The release of Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal last month was a big deal, since Ubuntu has for some time now been regarded as the "friendliest" Linux distribution. It is certainly the most well-publicized in the consumer space. Its Debian-based roots give it access to a thriving and well-maintained set of package repositories. Its breadth of supported hardware and easy (well, usually easy) installer means it works just about anywhere. Canonical has put a tremendous amount of effort (both in programming and branding!) into making Ubuntu a powerful and full-featured desktop operating system.

However, many of Canonical's choices have rankled the broader Linux community, particularly its decision to go with Unity as the main graphical shell over a traditional Linux shell like GNOME. It has also included Amazon.com-powered store listings in search results, leading to comical awfulness like this:

Enlarge/ In Ubuntu 12.10, searching for "updates" yields this. Wrong on so many levels.

Brian Proffitt

Canonical shows no intention of changing course, so alternatives to Ubuntu are becoming increasingly popular. The most mature at this point is Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, keeping its parent's flexibility and compatibility while taking a more traditional direction with its interface choices. The Mint developers have just released their latest version, Linux Mint 14, codenamed "Nadia," and it has a lot of nice things going for it.

Spin cycle

Like Ubuntu, Mint also features semiannual releases, usually about a month after Ubuntu. Since Mint uses Ubuntu as its core, the same long-term support rules apply; the previous release, Maya, was based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and will be supported with security and package updates until April 2017. Nadia will only be supported until April 2014, but newer versions of the operating system will be available prior to that.

The same rule of thumb applies to Mint as to Ubuntu: if you want to put it on critical systems or if you simply don't want to be bothered with distro updates, you should go with an LTS release.

Judging by the cover

Linux Mint comes with a choice of two graphical shells, neither of which are Unity. The graphical shell that gets top billing is MATE, a fork of the stalwart GNOME 2 shell. MATE supports all of GNOME 2's major features and is targeted at being a clean and simple interface with maximum compatibility.

The other main shell option is Cinnamon, which unlike MATE relies heavily on 3D acceleration to be flashier and a bit more modern. Cinnamon is forked from GNOME 3 instead of GNOME 2, and so its development pace is faster and its list of features is more in flux than MATE.

There are also community editions of Mint available, featuring both KDE and XFCE desktop environments, if those are more to your liking.

New stuff

The new release of Linux Mint features new versions of both the MATE and Cinnamon desktops; the update list for Cinnamon is particularly long, with improvements made to the shell's file browser, notification applet, workspace management area, and lots of other places. The system's display manager, MDM, has also been updated, incorporating new theming abilities along with better user switching and support for user pictures at logon.

Version 14 also includes significant changes to the operating system's update system, Software Manager, in the form of its own apt client with full debconf support and built-in root elevation, both broadening the scope of packages that can be installed and also freeing the user from having to enter his or her password for every install.

In addition to the graphical and shell changes, Linux Mint 14 includes all of the upstream software changes made to Ubuntu 12.10, including the 3.5 Linux kernel, Python 3, gcc 4.7.2, and LibreOffice 3.6.

Enlarge/ A quick peek under the hood shows the same updated components as Ubuntu Linux 12.10.

Lee Hutchinson

Can it serve?

There is no separate server version of Linux Mint, because Mint is primarily intended as a desktop operating system with different graphical underpinnings from Ubuntu. Ubuntu Server is free from all of the graphical woes that haunt its desktop counterpart, so if you need a headless Linux server to do server-y things with, Ubuntu is still a good candidate (along with its parent, Debian, or any other Linux distro with a server variant).

A viable alternative

Mint shows that desktop-friendly Linux comes in flavors other than Canonical's Ubuntu, though the fact that Mint uses Ubuntu as its base means that Mint's continued availability is tied to Ubuntu's success. The maintainers could always switch to another base (Ubuntu itself is based on Debian Linux), but Mint gains much of its power and flexibility through Canonical's polishing of the underlying components.

However, if you're fed up with Unity and disagree philosophically with Canonical's design choices, Mint is an excellent way to keep Ubuntu's compatibility while abandoning its UI. We had no problem installing both the MATE and Cinnamon flavors and spending some preliminary time with them—both work and act like a good desktop operating system should, with polished design elements and automatic hardware detection.

We'll keep Linux Mint on our review radar. If you are interested in a further deep dive, please comment below.

Promoted Comments

One problem I had with Mint is that it didn't support in-place distro upgrades, which Ubuntu has supported for a long time. The recommended upgrade path for Mint was to reinstall, which (IMHO) is a hassle.

As someone who enjoys tinkering and working with Linux but wants to keep an updated desktop, this was a major drawback.

155 Reader Comments

One problem I had with Mint is that it didn't support in-place distro upgrades, which Ubuntu has supported for a long time. The recommended upgrade path for Mint was to reinstall, which (IMHO) is a hassle.

As someone who enjoys tinkering and working with Linux but wants to keep an updated desktop, this was a major drawback.

@herko I'm afraid that's the case with Ubuntu, too. Or any other desktop system for that matter.

I have been using Ubuntu since it's version 6 and every single time I do a dist-upgrade and things crash badly. True, they're crashing less badly every release, but still crashes. I just did it to 12.10 and it crashed pidgin and the Unity sidebar got all weird.

Why is that? Well, configurations change, and my home directory has the old versions. When they just move places, I have the hassle of re-configuring all my applications again. If they don't, but change the options' names (as happened a few years back), applications start behaving erratically and "rm -rf ~" is in order.

I still upgrade Ubuntu on every new release, but I do it manually. My home partition is nor formatted, while the root partition is. I don't install with my user, but an user called "ubuntu". After installation, I move my old home to "foo", create my user and move all non-config stuff to it (docs, temp, etc), then, one by one, I move the configuration directories (.local, .purple, .gnome, etc) and restart the environment until it crashes, in which case I roll back.

It's not perfect, there can be long term problems, but they become a nuisance only just after a new upgrade, so I can live with it.

In the 90's, when I used DOS, and later Windows (sic), I had *exactly* the same problems. OS/2 was even worse. That's the price you pay for constant and radical updates, which is why Ubuntu is famous for.

There is no magic in putting up a distro that millions of different people will use and things will break. I'd be very surprised is Mint have solved that problem, for all millions of users it has.

I would like to make a plug for Mint Xfce -- which we have on three of our computers around the house, from an old Thinkpad with a 1 Ghz CPU to two much more modern laptops. It's rock-solid and simple for non-techie users.

As for the worries about the Linux command line: yes, I've used the command line here and there, but it was basically 1. Google something 2. follow simple instructions on a site 3. done. Of course, YMMV.

One problem I had with Mint is that it didn't support in-place distro upgrades, which Ubuntu has supported for a long time. The recommended upgrade path for Mint was to reinstall, which (IMHO) is a hassle.

As someone who enjoys tinkering and working with Linux but wants to keep an updated desktop, this was a major drawback.

I know what you mean, but Ubuntu doesn't upgrade that well, sometimes it breaks really bad. Hopefully someday Ubuntu will be a rolling release distro, but until then reinstall is also the best way to do it. One example where it breaks is trying to do a ppa-purge after a upgrade.

One problem I had with Mint is that it didn't support in-place distro upgrades, which Ubuntu has supported for a long time. The recommended upgrade path for Mint was to reinstall, which (IMHO) is a hassle.

As someone who enjoys tinkering and working with Linux but wants to keep an updated desktop, this was a major drawback.

I understand the reason for this is the direct upgrade being known to possibly break things. That being said, I've had zero problems the couple of times I upgraded Ubuntu (from 10.04 to 10.10 and the same install later to 11.04).

joehonkie wrote:

Mint also has a build based on Debain, the same core Ubuntu builds from. If Ubuntu somehow tragically falls to pieces, Mint can still keep going.

I have an Asus netbook that is a really nice windows 7 computer. I installed an SSD so it's pretty fast as well. In my case my AMD HD3200 integrated graphics is just simply not supported in Linux. Ubuntu runs the best out of the box hardware support and it will run on this netbook but Mint and plenty of others actually simply don't load a lot of graphical menus.

I like using Mint on VirtualBox for my open source development environment because it's incredibly stable. A few tweaks to what package repos I draw from (getting MySQL 5.5 and PHP 5.4 is a necessity for me) and I'm pretty much good to go out of the box.

Even better, as a primarily Windows 7 user, having Mint on VB means I can learn linux without worrying about accidentally nuking my setup. That lack of worry makes learning a fairly alien OS (to me) both fun and rewarding.

I bought a laptop from ZaReason with Mint 12 installed. When Mint 13 came out I emailed them and they very kindly gave me instructions as to how to make a fresh install from a USB stick. Very helpful people - and very easy!

After downloading the iso, you'll want to use 'Startup Disk Creator' to install the image onto the flash-drive. You can find 'Startup Disk Creator' by searching for it in Linux Mint, it's preinstalled.

In 'Startup Disk Creator' you'll want to:-Erase the contents of the flash-drive-Load the ISO-Make the disk-After it completes, restart and boot into the flash-drive by pressing F10 when you first turn on your computer to load the boot menu.-Select the flash-drive and proceed with the install.

I think they've changed the name of 'startup disk creator' in Mint 13 but otherwise the above instructions should be easy to follow.

Can anyone name another computer manufacturer which advises its customers in such a personal fashion? Excellent company!

And Mint is an excellent distro. C'mon, Ars enthusiasts, a fresh install isn't difficult. Give Mint 14 a try and I suspect you won't be disappointed. It is entirely devoid of "app-stores, sponsored searches, and skeuomorphism, too!

I've been using Mint on my desktop for a while, after a year of Unity hell. I mostly love Cinnamon, but it used to have a nasty memory leak. I hope that got better.

Given the hassle of updating Mint without having a partition just to backing up your home (which in my case, as a developer, is rather large), I'll probably pass on this update. But, really, if you like Ubuntu except for Unity, you should take a look at Mint.

I used Cinnamon and found it quite good, but it is lacking in polish. I feel the same way with Unity, I could handle these new DEs if only the effort was made to make something reliable with all the basic features.

Cinnamon for example had broken keyboard shortcuts for the last 6 months, unacceptable for me. Hopefully the fix made it into 14, but I did not wait around to find out.

I am now using Openbox which despite being fugly is incredibly fast and does everything I want, i.e. handles my windows and then gets out of my way.

I bought a laptop from ZaReason with Mint 12 installed. When Mint 13 came out I emailed them and they very kindly gave me instructions as to how to make a fresh install from a USB stick. Very helpful people - and very easy!

After downloading the iso, you'll want to use 'Startup Disk Creator' to install the image onto the flash-drive. You can find 'Startup Disk Creator' by searching for it in Linux Mint, it's preinstalled.

In 'Startup Disk Creator' you'll want to:-Erase the contents of the flash-drive-Load the ISO-Make the disk-After it completes, restart and boot into the flash-drive by pressing F10 when you first turn on your computer to load the boot menu.-Select the flash-drive and proceed with the install.

I think they've changed the name of 'startup disk creator' in Mint 13 but otherwise the above instructions should be easy to follow.

Can anyone name another computer manufacturer which advises its customers in such a personal fashion? Excellent company!

And Mint is an excellent distro. C'mon, Ars enthusiasts, a fresh install isn't difficult. Give Mint 14 a try and I suspect you won't be disappointed. It is entirely devoid of "app-stores, sponsored searches, and skeuomorphism, too!

It's amazing, but I can use RHEL6 and not have any of those things either.

I've been using Mint 13 with the Cinnamon shell on a laptop at home and a desktop at work and I'm pretty happy with it. The single biggest thing Linux Mint does right is having sane defaults and including all the settings tools in the default installation.

My only complaint is that the default MDM theme is ugly and I could not find a way to get it to automatically have the previous logged in user selected the way LightDM does. After spending a week tweaking a custom theme for MDM I finally just gave up and installed LightDM.

Not sure "fresh" is the term I'd use to describe Linux Mint, its basically a reheated Ubuntu with a reheated GNOME.

Do they still replace Google with DuckDuckGo in firefox? That was an annoying change when I tried it out, for an OS aimed at being easy that change was not very easy. I just ran back to Ubuntu. I prefer Unity or GNOME shell over Mints old crap.

We'll keep Linux Mint on our review radar. If you are interested in a further deep dive, please comment below.

Deep dive, please!

Downloading the cinnamon version. Looks and feels way better than MATE, but like the MATE menu better. A port is under consideration by the official dev team. In the meantime, someone already ported it :-)

Not sure "fresh" is the term I'd use to describe Linux Mint, its basically a reheated Ubuntu with a reheated GNOME.

Do they still replace Google with DuckDuckGo in firefox? That was an annoying change when I tried it out, for an OS aimed at being easy that change was not very easy. I just ran back to Ubuntu. I prefer Unity or GNOME shell over Mints old crap.

"If the unified search is bothering you though, you can remove it quite simply:

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping"

Quite simply for us, no big deal.

But things like this is the reason Linux will never be adopted by the masses. There's still a lot of line-command typing going on and that is simply not consumer friendly today, at all.

What people don't seem to realize is that you don't have to use the command line for these things. It's just that it's easier to put the command out there for people to copy/paste than it is to say: Open the Software Center, search for shopping lens (or whatever package), then click Uninstall. That is a simple example, but in many cases, describing the steps to do something from the GUI is much more tedious than just posting the command to do it.

I was using Linux Mint then switched to Linux Mint Debian Edition. That was heaven, even if the GUI got a bit screwy after going with the incoming repositories. I tried CentOS for kicks as well as for self education and that didn't turn out well.

I was about to flip for Fedora to get things like VLC working, but then MWO caught my eye. Win8 it is I'll be putting CentOS in a VM for self education.

The Gnome3 "Add Printer" control panel is still broken, like it is on EVERY distro that isn't Redhat-based. Which is absurd. Apparently it's been broken for months. There are alternative ways to configure the printer , of course, but then why isn't one of THOSE the default? This needs to be fixed immediately.

Cinnamon is nice and fast, and I like it. I like Mint better than any other distro at this point. Though, frankly, Windows 7 is still a MUCH better desktop, overall. There still isn't a (non-political) compelling reason to use Linux on the desktop .

That said, for a basic e-mail/web surfing/LibreOffice machine, it's pretty nice. And faster than hell.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.